"The New York Times is now as much a technology company as a journalism company," its executive editor Bill Keller said recently.

A glance at the top 10 breaking news sites online shows how seriously that statement must be taken, because in 2009 that list was often led by a tech company rather than a traditional news organisation. AOL News, Yahoo News or MSNBC News attract more US readers than CNN – or the New York Times.

Being a big traditional news brand doesn't necessarily bring you success on the web. "What got you to where you are, is not necessarily where you have to go now," says Kenneth KC Estenson, senior vice-president and general manager of CNN.com, when we meet at the Courthouse Hotel to talk about CNN Worldwide Digital.

The now renovated Courthouse displays the situation of news organisations perfectly: lots of nicely renovated rooms, but no windows to get what happens outside. Estenson's role is exaxtly to break down that wall.

Today, to get the platform right is as important as the quality of the content. So news organisations have to keep up with technological developments around them to stay in the game.

The two biggest US players for quality news, CNN and the New York Times, are dealing with this challenge in quite different ways. While CNN.com closely collaborates with technology companies like Facebook, Apple or Google, the New York Times anticipates technical change in-house with the help of its research and development department.

R&D at the New York Times

Calling the first research and development group in the industry their own, the New York Times takes its technological approach seriously. Already in January 2006, Michael Zimbalist had joined the Times Company as vice-president, research & development operations, and to envision the future of news. His 12-person team analyses data and test and builds products in order to safeguard the future of the 160-year-old brand.

2009 was the year when the New York Times executives understood the full impact of digitalisation. Being eager not to be disrupted but to play along with the disruptors, the executives made several efforts to understand what was going on – including reading the paper only on digital devices for a certain time.

The future of news consumption is the core of the technological approach of the Times. Apart from analysing web data for building the metered model, their R&D team continuously envisions how news reading might change with new technology, as for example with RFID chips.

As it is likely that RIFD chips will become quite common in the near future, the Times's R&D group invented ways a news organisation could make use of them. The project. called 'Shifd' – or in house, "Custom Times" – is a mobile application that provides users the capability to seamlessly shift content back and forth between their desktop computers and mobile devices.

"We made an experiment and put an RFID chip into the phone, the computer and the television. The chip was there to track the user's reading. When a user stopped reading a story on the phone as he or she arrived at work, it opened it again on the desktop. When the user entered the living room, related videos to the story were presented on the television screen," explains the NYT's Nick Bilton.

As news consumption changes massively with new media, the NYT puts a lot of effort in developing interfaces. "Touch makes interfaces a lot more compatible and easy to use, in addition to the fact that the web is moving into the living room and offers new connections," Bilton told me. He has just written a book called I Live in the Future: & Here's How It Works, which will illustrate the changing landscape taking place in storytelling industries.

For the New York Times, this aspect is apparent as they experiment a lot with different ways of telling the news. Apart from their regular homepage, the New York Times offers four different interfaces: Times Wire, Times Reader 2.0, Times Extra and Skimmer ; all the interfaces deliver them background data – useful when developing an iPad app, for example.

CNN.com translates technology back into journalism

While the New York Times keeps track with today's technological disruption by turning partly into a technology company themselves, CNN tries a slightly different approach: close collaboration.

Starting with CNN in September 2008, the general manager of CNN.com and senior vice-president KC Estenson overhauled the management team at CNN.com and set them on a new strategic direction driven by innovation and embracing new technologies and partnerships.

Estenson believes that you have to have deep relationships with today's technology leaders when you want play along. "We don't wanna be slaves to trends but it is vital knowledge to us. I want us to be considered. Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook: I made it a priority for us to be in first position with them," he says.

Since Estenson took over, CNN has launched an iPhone application, redesigned its website and reached out more to social media. CNN was among the first TV broadcasters to understand the full impact of social media on television, and teamed up with Facebook for the presidential inauguration.

As the live Facebook feed on CNN.com made it possible to watch the proceedings along with comments from your friends in the sidebar, the broadcaster was able to report 600,000 status updates and record breaking 21.3 million video stream views globally on that day, with a peak of 1.3 million streams just before Obama began his speech.

But more interesting than just integrating the new technology within the site is CNN.com's translation of social media back into journalism. CNN took citizen journalism not only as an inevitable add-on, but as something that carries serious weight.

The iReport button has prominent place in the baseline of CNN's iPhone app Public Domain

iReport was initially launched August 2006 basically as a commission form, and has become more important after the Virginia Tech massacre. It is said that internally it was a big discussion with the executives, but in February 2008 it was accepted as a legitimate source of newsgathering within CNN. Estenson decided to professionalise iReport further.

Apart from integrating iReport prominently at the center of CNN's website instead of hiding it away at the bottom, the iPhone application integrated iReport prominently. Today, CNN's iPhone app is as much a news-making as a news delivering application, and as the iReporters can add their telephone number, email and location to their report, CNN's editors can get back to them or even assign them to certain content CNN is looking for.

Today, there are about 10,000 iReports per month which are available to CNN.com. For each bigger event, an iReport monitoring journalist familiar with the context of the event will be assigned to the breaking news team. iReport clearly enriched the coverage of the Haiti earthquake of CNN as CNN had seven reporters on the ground and significantly enhanced their work with social media.

Conclusion

CNN.com and New York Times are two good examples for news organisations which came to understand that today technology plays a serious part in their business. Today, getting the technology right is not more important than good journalism, but it is as important.

In fact, technology is becoming more and more an integral part of doing good journalism. The different approach to technology at the New York Times and CNN makes it apparent that each has to fit a journalistic brand, though, as how technology is approached is part of a journalistic profile. Either way it looks like the news organisations that tear down the wall and build a bridge between editorial and technological thinking will be most likely to survive.